Rackspace Cloud Mushrooms To Host Larger Businesses

Rackspace Hosting announced that it is looking towards service providers to help its expansion plans for the OpenStack-based cloud computing offering. It is planning to offer telcos and other large organisations the opportunity to bundle up the OpenStack cloud so they can sell-on the service to their own customers.

The programme would see Rackspace build and run interoperable public clouds for service providers around the world.

Stacks of room

To support these large service providers, Rackspace plans to make all the components needed to build a successful cloud business available. This would include the cloud hardware and software infrastructure with continuous automated testing, and delivery of updates from Rackspace’s engineering teams. It will also offer patching and monitoring help, go-to-market sales support, and training.

“We have had interest from service providers on nearly every continent to extend Rackspace’s proven OpenStack-powered public cloud solutions and expertise to their customers. It is important to broaden the adoption of open source technologies through partners around the world,” said Lanham Napier, CEO for Rackspace.

“The creation of this network allows for different providers, in different regions, with different service characteristics to link together to better serve the cloud users around the world.”

An analyst at research firm IDC warned that not every provider wants to, or should, build a cloud from scratch but generally welcomed Rackspace’s initiative.

“Rackspace’s experience with cloud computing and this turnkey, packaged, cloud solution should be of interest to other providers,” said IDC’s Gary Chen, research manager for cloud and virtualisation system software.  “IDC believes that a global, federated, service-provider cloud network that allows creation of hybrid clouds with resources from multiple public providers could be a compelling solution for customers.”